A lot has been written – and I expect a lot more is yet to be written
- about the attention to detail and unique grasp of design aesthetic
that Steve Jobs exerted on Apple product development. A reasonable
observation and not a new one. But the implication that goes with it
which I find curious is that those slacker open source/free software
people who are threatening to eat his lunch with Android or (perhaps
less convincingly) with Ubuntu have no hope of ever replicating this
setup because as they’re volunteer-based they have to spend too much
time being nice to their contributors.

Ignoring the quibble that Android’s not actually a very good exemplar
of open source development style (development directions are quite
obviously set by Google, and at the time I write this there have been
two major releases since they even pushed any open source stuff out at
all) this argument falls down because it’s simply not true. Free
software projects can be very good indeed at maintaining exacting
standards in areas that they care about, and not apparently caring too
much whose toes they tread on in the process – it’s just that the
areas they care about are much more related to code quality and
maintainability than typography and exact shades of yellow

Taking the Linux kernel for an example, the particular story that
prompted this observation was the Broadcom wireless drivers
contribution, but I could add to that: Reiserfs, nvidia ethernet,
Intel ethernet drivers, Android wake locks, and a zillion other less
high-profile cases where badly coded patches have not been accepted,
even when the rejection is due to something as trivial as whitespace[*].
(OK, maybe I was wrong to say they don’t care about typography ;-) So,
the social/organisational structures exist for an open source project
to be quite incredibly demanding of high standards and yet remain
successful – the question of why they don’t extend these standards to external factors and “UX” probably has to remain open. And don’t tell
me it’s because they don’t appreciate good design when it is on offer,
because the number of Macs I see at conferences invalidates that
hypothesis straight off.

[*] I am reasonably sure this is not an exaggeration, although I can
no longer find the mail from when it happened to me so I may be
misremembering.